Uncle Vanya

A retired professor arrives at his late first wife's country estate with his beautiful young second wife, and the household falls apart. Uncle Vanya, who has spent twenty-five years running the estate and sending its income to the professor, realises that the man he served is a fraud. The country doctor Astrov, who plants forests and drinks too much, falls for the young wife, while plain, devoted Sonya loves him in silence.

First staged by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, Uncle Vanya is a comedy of wasted lives in which almost nothing happens and everything changes. Sonya's final speech about the rest that awaits them is one of the most moving endings in theatre. Read it with The Lady with the Dog for Chekhov at his best.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was the grandson of a serf who bought his family's freedom. He studied medicine in Moscow and paid for his studies and his family's keep by writing hundreds of humorous sketches for magazines. 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress,' he once wrote, and he practised both all his life.

In 1890 he crossed Siberia to study the prison island of Sakhalin. His short stories, like The Lady with the Dog, and his plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, like Uncle Vanya, transformed both forms with their quiet, open endings. He died of tuberculosis in Germany at forty-four.